My favorite exhibition I’ve seen this year is called In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers, and it’s currently on display at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design. 

Henry David Thoreau, it turns out, was doing more on his walks around Walden Pond than just philosophizing: He also meticulously documented and preserved hundreds of plants, which are now housed at Harvard’s herbarium. Scientists have been able to use those records to track the impacts of climate change: when flowers bloom earlier, which plants are now entirely locally extinct. 

In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers has a small museum footprint, but something that jumped out to me about it is how the show feels designed for people to truly absorb information. Museums aren’t just about passive looking anymore; they’re about experiencing, as the show’s immersive data visualizations attest. It’d be pretty hard to visit and not leave feeling inspired to do something to help fight climate change—plant a native flower, maybe, or a pollinator garden.

If you’re looking for other art shows in the Triangle, check out our roundup from last month. Thanks for reading! 

A visitor takes in an installation at In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers. Read more here. Photo courtesy of the Gregg Museum of Art & Design.

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also in the culture section

Nnenna Freelon launched her new book, Beneath the Skin of Sorrow, at the Nasher last night. Here’s Shelbi Polk’s profile of the evolution of the book, born from a series of deep losses that the Durham jazz vocalist and composer has experienced in recent years.

“I wrote my way out of depression, out of a sense of ‘What is my life now? What use is it to consider myself as what I was?’” Freelon says over a video chat from her airy living room. She wrote herself through the “very uncomfortable” transition period. “I wasn’t looking to write a book, necessarily,” Freelon says, “but I was writing to save a life.” 

Here are some ideas for things to do this week. 

A new nonprofit, Triangle Central Kitchen (TCK), hopes to launch a pilot program next year to help address food insecurity, merging job training with surplus food sourced from area farms and restaurants. North Carolina is one of the 36 states where SNAP recipients may not receive food assistance during November, due to the shutdown—a crisis that comes on top of new restrictions that the Trump administration has placed on SNAP—meaning food banks and programs like TCK are about to become more vital than ever. 

ICYMI: Ghost hunters, Raleigh baseball dreams, and fall movies.

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out and about in the triangle

The trolls are here. A goodbye to Morrisville’s old country store. In Raleigh, Legends Nightclub is moving two blocks down from its current location. I’ve never been to NCMA’s cloud chamber installation, but I badly want to go. Durham musician Joe Westerlund has a new album out today. Finally, zooming out a bit, here’s a New York Times piece about the art that’s come out of Western North Carolina in the year since Helene.  

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— Sarah Edwards —
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Sarah Edwards is culture editor of the INDY, covering cultural institutions and the arts in the Triangle. She joined the staff in 2019 and assumed her current role in 2020.